Sascha SeganNokia Lumia 920 (AT&T)One of the first handsets shipping with Windows Phone 8, the big, beautiful Nokia Lumia 920 is the most powerful, versatile option available. But the phone itself is overgrown, and the platform has some growing to do.

Huge and heavy. Windows Phone has fewer and different apps from more popular platforms.

Bottom Line

One of the first handsets shipping with Windows Phone 8, the big, beautiful Nokia Lumia 920 is the most powerful, versatile option available. But the phone itself is overgrown, and the platform has some growing to do.

The Nokia Lumia 920 ($99.99 with contract) takes its role as Windows Phone's "flagship" seriously: It feels like it's the size of an aircraft carrier. If you're willing to put up with a huge chunk of smartphone in your pocket, though, you'll get the best performance Windows Phone 8 has to offer, along with important, exclusive apps that really enhance the phone's experience.

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Whether you like big phones is a personal choice, but know that they're a growing segment of the market. The Lumia 920 is in the same size class as the LG Optimus G, Motorola Razr Maxx HD, and the HTC Titan II, for instance. This is where my personal choices diverge from my rating and recommendation. The Lumia 920 is too big for me. But it might not be too big for you.

Physical DesignThe Lumia 920 is built like a tank. Its main body is a thick block of polycarbonate with rolled edges and a 4.5-inch Gorilla Glass screen on the front. The headphone jack is at the top center of the phone; the micro USB jack is at the bottom center. There's no memory card slot, and the battery is sealed in. The right side holds the Volume, Power, and Camera buttons. They're all prominent and easy to press, although I kept confusing the Power and Camera buttons.

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Nokia offers more color options, but on AT&T, the phone comes in red, white, blue, yellow and black. The red and yellow are both very aggressive and glossy, like an Italian sports car. The blue is bright, but less exclamatory. The black is matte, the white glossy and sleek. Of the bunch, I like the white and blue best. Too many phones are black, and the red and yellow are just bright enough to be divisive.

At 5.1 by 2.8 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and over 6.5 ounces, the Lumia 920 is the biggest, heaviest phone in its class. It's thicker than the LG Optimus G, wider than the Motorola Razr Maxx HD, and taller than the HTC Titan II. It's even heavier than the Samsung Galaxy Note II "phablet." While the Lumia 920 feels solid as a rock, it also weighs your pocket down like a stone.

You get a smaller screen here than on competing Android phones of the same size (4.5 versus 4.7 inches), but the 920's display is absolutely gorgeous. Nokia has loaded it down with meaningless brand-words like "PureMotion" and "ClearBlack," but what we have here is a 1,280-by-768-pixel, IPS LCD panel with intensely deep blacks and super-saturated colors. It's higher-density than the Apple iPhone 5's screen, at 331 pixels per inch to the iPhone's 325, and it's very bright.

Sit the Lumia 920 next to the 4.3-inch HTC 8X, and the 8X looks a little dim and washed out. The bigger screen also makes Windows Phone's somewhat picky touch keyboard a lot more usable; I experienced noticeably fewer typos on the Lumia 920 than I did on the HTC 8X.

With seemingly no concerns about weight, Nokia threw a 2000mAh battery into the 920's sealed case. I got 9 hours, 56 minutes of 3G talk time, which is very good, and just under four hours of streaming YouTube video over LTE on high screen brightness, which is average for high-end smartphones. The 8X had less talk time, but more streaming video time thanks to its smaller screen.

One of its stand-out features, the 920 features wireless charging, which Nokia talks about with great enthusiasm, but which various manufacturers and carriers have been trying to promote for years with little success. Wireless charging isn't completely wireless, of course: A charging pad still needs to be plugged into an outlet, but you don't need to plug anything into the actual phone itself. While Nokia hasn't released prices for its wireless charging stand and pillow, the compatible Energizer Single-Position Inductive Charger lists for $54.99, much more than the $5 you'll pay on the street for a micro USB charging cable.

Although the Lumia 920 doesn't have a memory card slot, it does have 32GB of built-in storage, more than any of the competing first-round Windows Phone 8 models.

Phone Calling and InternetI tested the Lumia 920 in a storm-ravaged New York City on a truly wobbly AT&T LTE network, so I'm writing off the dropped calls; I've been getting dropped calls on all of my phones this week. Voice call quality here is better than on the HTC 8X. The earpiece and speakerphone are louder, and there's a ton of side-tone, preventing you from yelling into the phone.

The phone had no problem pairing with a Plantronics Voyager Legend Bluetooth headset and triggering Microsoft's voice commands from the headset. The voice command software, however, isn't great. It dials the phone just fine, but free-form queries like "how's the weather?" generate Web searches rather than direct answers.

AT&T's LTE network typically offers the fastest downloads in the nation, where it's available. Right now it covers 80 cities, well short of Verizon's 400 LTE markets. Here in New York, I've gotten consistently faster results on AT&T than on Verizon. In our most recent pre-hurricane tests in New York, we saw 19.21Mbps down on AT&T as compared to only 7.67Mbps on Verizon. Performance really varies city by city, though, so make sure to check our Fastest Mobile Networks tests, which covered 30 U.S. cities.

The Lumia 920 supports an insane number of frequency bands, making it able to connect to global HSPA+ and LTE networks—that is, if AT&T has roaming agreements with those carriers. Right now there are no LTE roaming agreements in place, so international roaming will be at still-impressive HSPA+ 42 speeds.

The Lumia 920 also supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS, and NFC. It works as a Wi-Fi hotspot for up to 5 devices with the appropriate data plan. Both the Lumia 920 and the HTC 8X were able to max out my 15Mbps cable connection over Wi-Fi.

Apps, Maps, and ExclusivesThe Nokia Lumia 920 and HTC 8X both use the same 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm S4 Krait processor, and both show similar benchmark results. On cross-platform benchmark Antutu, they perform similarly to the top echelon of Android phones. On Web browser benchmarks, they show the characteristics of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 10: surprisingly slow Browsermark scores, fast Sunspider Javascript scores, and great Guimark HTML5 gaming scores. In my experience, that means pages appeared to start rendering more slowly than on competing Android phones, but once pages were rendered, they scrolled smoothly and interactive elements responded quickly.

For the ins and outs of the platform, read our Windows Phone 8 review. The difference in performance between these Windows phones is more about the included apps, and here Nokia has an edge. Nokia Maps, Drive, and Transit are a very big deal. Microsoft's Bing Maps isn't nearly up to the quality of Google Maps on Android. It has no turn-by-turn, voice-guided navigation, no transit directions, and a limited POI database with, in my neighborhood, a lot of inaccuracies. AT&T puts Telenav on its phones, but it costs $9.99 per month or $1.99 per day.

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed...
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